In a Wrestling Match Over Space, a Sudden Shove

Over the routine din of Union Square, you could hear the drills and their spiraling whines. All around were sights that went with the sounds. Sheets of raw plywood, set on sawhorses, measured twice and cut once to size. A woman on a stepladder, a pan of red paint in reach, the swabs of her brush laying holiday color on the wood. A man atop a counter, clipping light fixtures onto a rack that ran overhead, fed by electrical cables that roped along the back of the stall.

The southern end of Union Square Park pulsed with the joyous noise of things being put together on Tuesday afternoon. The annual holiday market, a place of much charm, was being erected. More than 100 stalls were set up for vendors who, for the most part, seem to be catering to the arts and crafts equivalent of the Greenmarket, feeding locavore appetites.

The entire operation is organized by a private company that sets up markets like this around the world; in New York, the city receives $1 million for essentially leasing the parkland for the Christmas shopping season. In this park, tents and generators were not only officially welcome, but also would be in place around the clock for the next five weeks.

As it happens, a few hours earlier, the police had evicted people squatting downtown in Zuccotti Park. Those people were told that they could come back, but without tents and generators, which were deemed to be dangerous and hogging all the room in the park.

There is no end to the wrestling match for space in New York, only breaks in which everyone goes to a corner to contemplate the next moves. Not every park can be turned over on a permanent basis to commercial or to political interests, no matter how fine the handmade jewelry may be in the vendor stalls, or how important the argument passed along by megaphone.

That is, we have to share. About five years ago, the same judge who said on Tuesday that the city could ban camping in the park gave an opinion in a case involving mass bicycle rallies.

Photo

One place in the city where tents were welcome on Tuesday: Union Square Park, with its holiday gift market, seen here in 2008.Credit
Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

“The social compact and the realities of living in a crowded place demand patience, mutual respect and self-restraint,” Justice Michael D. Stallman wrote.

This may sound like the stuff taught in kindergarten, but it is also the kind of wisdom that lasts. And it applies not only to people occupying parks; it also ought to be heard by those in charge of carrying out evictions.

With no notice, the city arrived around 1 a.m. with a military plan to evict the demonstrators and to remove their belongings. Helicopters, bulldozers, klieg lights and a small army were marshaled to the scene. From the police perspective, the lack of forewarning may have seemed tactically prudent: last month, when the city announced that it wanted the park emptied temporarily for a cleaning, a brigade of protesters arrived to block what they saw as a transparent ploy to stop the occupation.

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Yet what worked for a night might not last. Not giving people a day or two, or even an evening, to get out of there with their stuff brought the police dangerously close to looking like bullies. Over the last two months, the Police Department has, in the view of many on the scene, avoided confrontations and accommodated marches that had not been arranged ahead of time.

The most striking exception to this equanimity was the reckless, needless pepper-spraying in late September by a deputy inspector of several young women who were standing on a sidewalk. (Initially, the police commissioner and his chief spokesman said the women had provoked the pepper-spraying with “tumultuous” behavior. Later, however, the commissioner punished the inspector by docking 15 days of his vacation and transferring him to a new job.)

The video of that pepper-spraying surged across the Internet. Suddenly, Occupy Wall Street, a movement defined loosely as being a protest against economic injustice and inequality, had human faces and voices: the women screaming on the ground. That clip wasn’t the only reason that the movement got attention, but as symbol and substance, it was hard to beat.

Talking people out of Zuccotti Park or giving 72 hours’ notice might have been exercises in futility. But they weren’t tried. And for the most part, television cameras were kept at a distance. Doing tough things in the dark, when no one can see you, is not one of the lessons they teach in kindergarten.

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on November 16, 2011, on Page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: In a Wrestling Match Over Space, a Sudden Shove. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe